Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 292 posts

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#101

Post by ptero »

hyperbovine wrote: post #94
chriskanan wrote: post #6

The longer students stay in a PhD program, the less likely they want to be professors. Typically many first year students say this, but the numbers quickly drop off in later years. When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wan…

> ... you work 80 hours per week and make less than ... I've read so many comments like yours, on HN and elsewhere, and invariably the argument hinges on some variation of the above sentiment. I've come to believe I just have fundamentally different values than the vast majority of people who work in industry. To answer your (friends') question, because the work is more interesting and I make plenty of money as it st…

I think work hours and salary have a bimodal distribution, driven by tenured / non-tenured status. My experience is in theoretical math/physics -- I got my PhD but decided not to stay in academia; there are pros and cons to both options.

IME most tenured professors have to work significantly less than others for the same salary (those who work more mostly do it because they like working with grad students, not because they get financial benefits for it). Quality of life is good, good benefits, few and flexible work hours, sabbaticals, etc. Salary is lower than at the top of the industry, but sufficient for a comfortable life. Those who do good research can escape for the summer to interesting parts of the world to summer schools and visiting colleagues using grant money.

However, non-tenured professors have it much harder. And postdocs are usually the underclass.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#102

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

disinterred wrote: post #29
chriskanan wrote: post #6

The longer students stay in a PhD program, the less likely they want to be professors. Typically many first year students say this, but the numbers quickly drop off in later years. When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wan…

When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary. The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach and if you minimize the amount of teaching you do, you'll barely be working at all. I knew a history professor that would come into the university for his 1 or 2 classes per week and then would go home for the rest of the day…

"When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary. The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach."

I doubt this is true for the United States, but it is definitely false for many European countries. Tenure gives you job security, but it also brings an enormous amount of administrative obligations. In my experience, conversations with tenured faculty tend to revolve around how much they hate the endless bullshit meetings they are required to attend, the long many-page forms they have to constantly fill out for uni administration, and how it has really eaten into their time for research or family life.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#103

Post by pc86 »

foo101 wrote: post #82
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You state your opinion, but don't justify it -- could you share why you think it is important we list first author by contribution? What does this accomplish? Obviously not everyone agrees (or you wouldn't have felt the need to post), so why not share why you think you're right, so we can discuss the issue? Edit: Well, we've proven that people feel very strongly about this, but I'm no closer to understanding why peop…

I don't publish papers, so I don't have a strong opinion about it. But like you, I am genuinely curious why alphabetical order was chosen as the convention rather than the amount of contributions (like GitHub does[1]). If the answer is that contributions to scientific papers can be very fuzzy, e.g. it is hard to determine which contribution is more important than others, then I agree alphabetical order makes sense. B…

Isn't GitHub just ranking by number of commits? That's not a very good measure of contribution. After all, I don't think tensorflow-gardener is the primary contributor of Tensorflow.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#104

Post by Qworg »

ptero wrote: post #101
hyperbovine wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... you work 80 hours per week and make less than ... I've read so many comments like yours, on HN and elsewhere, and invariably the argument hinges on some variation of the above sentiment. I've come to believe I just have fundamentally different values than the vast majority of people who work in industry. To answer your (friends') question, because the work is more interesting and I make plenty of money as it st…

I think work hours and salary have a bimodal distribution, driven by tenured / non-tenured status. My experience is in theoretical math/physics -- I got my PhD but decided not to stay in academia; there are pros and cons to both options. IME most tenured professors have to work significantly less than others for the same salary (those who work more mostly do it because they like working with grad students, not becaus…

Also, many tenured professors double dip into industry as well, leveraging their guaranteed position for minimized exposure if the startup goes poorly.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#105

Post by chriskanan »

hyperbovine wrote: post #94
chriskanan wrote: post #6

The longer students stay in a PhD program, the less likely they want to be professors. Typically many first year students say this, but the numbers quickly drop off in later years. When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wan…

> ... you work 80 hours per week and make less than ... I've read so many comments like yours, on HN and elsewhere, and invariably the argument hinges on some variation of the above sentiment. I've come to believe I just have fundamentally different values than the vast majority of people who work in industry. To answer your (friends') question, because the work is more interesting and I make plenty of money as it st…

Think of it as running a small startup, if the time doesn't make sense. My time is split between teaching and preparing teaching, raising funding, mentoring (on the job training), and lastly trying to figure out the next big thing.

The rewards are getting to be your own boss, advancing the knowledge of humanity, and cultivating the next generation of scientists. It is hard work and time intensive, but most things worth doing are.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#106

Post by yannis7 »

loarake wrote: post #98
yannis7 wrote: post #22

Academia nowadays is a high-tech bureaucracy; you are forced to churn out documents (papers) that need to cite other documents, and you're evaluated based on your position in the inter-document citation network. Then you have to write other documents (grant proposals) to grab money to write more documents (papers) by gaming the inner mechanics of some comittee. If partner-track investment bankers are overworked, depr…

-Working for a big tech company: you're writing code to deliver more ads to more people so the company can grow and deliver even more ads to even more people -Being a truck driver: you're moving boxes around -Being a professional hockey player: you and your team are moving really fast with a disk shaped object trying to put it in a net while people try to prevent you from doing it -Being a stock trader: making money…

I guess my point was that the "moral" aspect of academia (="pushing the limits of knowledge") has faded away over the last few decades.

Currently departments are pressing researchers towards output rather than long-term quality work - at least that was the key aspect of my post-doctoral experience.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#107

Post by Halladie7 »

chriskanan wrote: post #6

The longer students stay in a PhD program, the less likely they want to be professors. Typically many first year students say this, but the numbers quickly drop off in later years. When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wan…

Grad school dropout here. I never wanted to be a professor. I have no interest in teaching. I just wanted to research. My degree would have been in CS/ML/NLP.

When I realized that I would be out over half a million dollars in earnings over the time I was in grad school, I made the decision to leave. The fact that my advisor was a terrible researcher and a horrible person made it much easier.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#108

Post by wil421 »

disinterred wrote: post #29
chriskanan wrote: post #6

The longer students stay in a PhD program, the less likely they want to be professors. Typically many first year students say this, but the numbers quickly drop off in later years. When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wan…

When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary. The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach and if you minimize the amount of teaching you do, you'll barely be working at all. I knew a history professor that would come into the university for his 1 or 2 classes per week and then would go home for the rest of the day…

My programming 101 teacher was exactly like this except instead of going home he would go to his lab. He was extremely disorganized and would spend the first 30-45 minutes of class making sure his java programs were working for the lecture.

A student finally asked him why he doesn’t come prepared to class. His response was he teaches he easiest class the can and only the minimum amount of classes he needs to. He wanted to work on his research and get grants not teach.

He was making 150k.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#109

Post by turk184 »

chriskanan wrote: post #6

The longer students stay in a PhD program, the less likely they want to be professors. Typically many first year students say this, but the numbers quickly drop off in later years. When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wan…

Yeah, mine hangs on the wall, unused. The pay would have been half what I made just doing software development. Oh well, I enjoyed my 20s and poverty was hard at times but didn't scar me.
Post reply on HN